Tuesday, July 15, 2008

We still await the scientific proof of harm reduction's success

MARGARET WENTE

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Ten months before Vancouver's supervised-injection site opened in 2003, two young researchers gave a stirring presentation. They argued that such a facility was vital in order to reduce public-health problems and disorder in the city's notorious drug scene. The evidence from elsewhere was overwhelming, they insisted, and it was time to act. “I'm all for it,” said Evan Wood, one of the presenters. “Get one open. Enough's enough already.”

Neither Mr. Wood nor his colleague, Thomas Kerr, had a background in addictions medicine or public policy. Mr. Kerr was a PhD candidate in educational psychology, and Mr. Wood was a PhD candidate in health and epidemiology. Yet today, they and a small group of associates have made their reputation in the world of drug policy as the authors of nearly two dozen research papers – every one of which reports remarkably positive results for Insite, the controversial supervised-injection facility for which they themselves had lobbied hard.

It is this research – all produced under the umbrella of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS – that is repeatedly cited as scientific proof of Insite's success. It is this research that has persuaded politicians, policy-makers, editorial writers and much of the general public that Insite is a compassionate and progressive tool for harm reduction that saves lives and reduces suffering. After all, at least 22 peer-reviewed papers say so.

In fact, Mr. Wood, Mr. Kerr and their associates often act more like advocates than impartial researchers. They aggressively denounce anyone who even suggests that the value of Insite might still be a matter for legitimate study or debate. They accuse Insite's critics of being blinded by ideology and of willfully ignoring mountains of “peer-reviewed,” “evidence-based” studies.

Yet even experts who think Insite is a worthwhile experiment say the case has not yet been made. Dr. Brian Conway, one of Canada's top experts on AIDS policy, is one of them. “How much has it done in terms of reducing the HIV-Hep-C infection rate, the rate of serious illness that results from drug use, in terms of saving lives? That hasn't been demonstrated.” Nor is quantity the same as quality. The sheer volume of published research “is more of a tribute to the efficiency of the people who are writing the papers than anything else.” And in public, the researchers “have tended not to present the limitations” of their findings.

Some people are not so diplomatic. “You can churn out all the research you like if you've got a vested interest,” says addictions doctor Milan Khara. The B.C. Centre for Excellence receives millions of dollars worth of government contracts for research on drug issues. The tab for the Insite studies is well over $2-million. Yet none of these studies addresses the central issue in the public mind: Does Insite reduce overall drug use?

Garth Davies teaches research methodology at Simon Fraser University's school of criminology. He recently published an evaluation of all the research literature on safe-injection facilities, including Insite. He wasn't impressed. “[They] are too often credited with generating positive effects that are not borne out by solid empirical evidence,” he wrote. “As a result of methodological and analytical problems … all claims remain open to question.”

Despite this fatal weakness, “there are very few other substantive areas of research where the debate is this one-sided,” Prof. Davies said in an interview. The same small set of people peer-review each other's work, and even the drug journals are politicized. “It's very difficult to get a contrarian opinion published. If you're not on the side of supervised injection, you get marginalized.”

In any event, researchers who want to analyze the data for themselves are out of luck, because the researchers refuse to share it. Steven Lehrer, who studies health economics at Queen's University, says it's frustrating. “They were reporting unbelievably large effects,” he says. And that makes it especially important for independent researchers to validate the results. “They don't seem interested,” he says.

Could it be that the fix is in? When researchers behave like advocates, it's hard to believe otherwise. “They act as if it's a done deal,” says Prof. Davies. “It has become a professional mission for them.”

6 comments:

Thanks for posting this! What a shock, eh, that the fix was in with the "research" from the get go!

But doing a Google News Search of "Margaret Wente" reveals that the knives have already come out for here from all of the usual suspects. They, of course, don't argue her points directly but instead just attack her personally and then throw out faulty stats.

I expanded upon this here and quoted your brilliant "1 Pillar and 3 Matchsticks" quote.

Kudos to Margaret Wente and the Globe and Mail. It's about time some real investigative journalism looked into the giant scam called Insite. Perhaps the wasted millions of tax dollars funnelling into this tragedy might soon be redirected towards actual addiction intervention and treatment (the true definition of harm reduction).

News reports this morning claim that the BC public have lost confidence in their court system. Well duh! If the public have lost confidence in the court system, they have lost confidence in the government and all its insane policies like the supervised-injection site.

Will Gordo or Wally Awful resign? Not a chance of it and BC will continue to spiral down into the age of 'mediocrity' where the wealthy elites remain wealthy and the poor just get poorer.

"BC, The best place on earth!" Um, not if you are a career criminal, an addict, or a corrupted (by power?) politician.